Visual LANSA Features

All the Productivity of Low-Code Without Losing Any Control

The LANSA Low-Code Development Platform

The LANSA low-code development platform accelerates application development by eliminating the need to master the multiple technical skills normally required to produce software applications. With LANSA, only a single skill needs to be mastered to build applications across all different mobile devices, browsers, servers, and cloud platforms.

Four Pillars of the LANSA Platform:

The four pillars of the LANSA platform shield developers from having to worry about how their project will be deployed across various devices, interfaces, and platforms. This enables them to remain focused on quickly delivering business applications.

Application Framework – Get It Right the First Time

Programmers can struggle with designing enterprise user interfaces and often miss the mark with user expectations, especially since users can have difficulty defining what they want.

A Better Way to Prototype

A key feature is the Prototyping Wizard. Prototypes can be defined in minutes, and designers can email a web link to the application so that users can review and provide immediate feedback. Application prototypes transform gradually and easily into the final working applications.

A Better Way to Develop

The Visual LANSA Framework was designed to boost developer productivity by providing an easy-to-use and intuitive development framework that hides and abstracts low-level functionality to achieve extraordinary levels of productivity and a shorter learning curve.

The application framework enforces user-interface design concepts that follow the standard conventions users find familiar. This model provides a design style where everything a user needs to do is just a few clicks away.

Language-Based Low-Code without Limitations

In even the best of the other low-code development platforms, when developers try to reach beyond the capabilities of the platform (for example, to implement complex business logic) the only remedy they have is to drop down into another IDE and code extensions in additional scripts and languages that are integrated with the other generated code. This is troublesome for a number of reasons.

Additional code interfaces through specific low-code platform extensions and/or APIs that confine and add to the complexity of the development.
The additional code artifacts need to be externally version controlled and configuration managed to coincide with the versions of the generated low-code application(s) for which the added code was written.
You would be introducing technology-standard version interdependencies between the additional code, the generated low-code applications, and the low-code platform itself.

These all sound like typical software engineering problems that can be managed and solved by developers as they often are thought of as the normal course of software development practice. They are indeed. But they are not without significant cost and consequence.

Business Rules Engine – Our Secret Sauce

LANSA low-code development platform allows business analysts the ability to define and maintain system-wide business rules and validation logic in a single location—external from source code. This reduces maintenance costs 50 to 80% and eliminates duplication of source code.

More Than Just a Rules Engine

LANSA’s Business Rules Engine is more than a dictionary of data definitions and validation rules—it promotes an entirely different approach to application development. Developers can also store reusable components, data visualizations, help text, and more to minimize hand-coding, maximize reuse, and standardize UI design practices.

Governing Your Data

LANSA Business Rules Engine automatically starts whenever an application updates business data so validation checks are never missed. Rule changes are easy. Change the rule in the Rules Engine and it is automatically applied in every program that uses that rule.

The Business Rules Engine keeps and enforces rules through independent Data Services Layer. It manages the execution of rules across all databases and server platforms so IT are no longer limited to a particular combination of hardware, operating system, database, and application.

Independent Data Services Layer – To Protect and Serve

LANSA Business Rules Engine keeps applications separated from the databases with which they work. The Data Services Layer makes this possible. In order to maximize the reach of the Business Rules Engine, the LANSA Data Services Layer is accessible from any program on any platform.

Not in the Database or the Application

Typically, rules are maintained either in code or at the database level. The downside of storing rules in source code is code duplication, potential inconsistencies, and difficulty managing changes. The downside of storing rules in the database via stored procedures, column validations, triggers, etc., is database lock-in because each DBMS has its own way of implementing rules, triggers, and stored procedures.